WEINGARTNER, FELIX, composer and musical conductor, born at Zara, Dalmatia; has composed symphonic poems, operas, and songs; b. 1863.

WEISMANN, AUGUST, biologist, born at Frankfort-on-the-Main; studied medicine at Goettingen; devoted himself to the study of zoology, the first-fruit of which was a treatise on the “Development of Diptera,” and at length to the variability in organisms on which the theory of descent, with modifications, is based, the fruit of which was a series of papers published in 1882 under the title of “Studies on the Theory of Descent”; but it is with the discussions on the question of heredity that his name is most intimately associated.  The accepted theory on the subject assumes that characters acquired by the individual are transmitted to offspring, and this assumption, in his “Essays upon Heredity,” he maintains to be wholly groundless, and denies that it has any foundation in fact; heredity, according to him, is due to the continuity of the germ-plasm, or the transmission from generation to generation of a substance of a uniform chemical and molecular composition; b. 1834.

WEISS, BERNHARD, German theologian, born at Koenigsberg; became professor at Kiel and afterwards at Berlin; has written on the theology of the New Testament, an introduction to it, and a “Leben Jesu,” all able works; b. 1827.

WEISSENFELS (23), a town of Prussian Saxony, 35 m.  SW. of Leipzig, with an old castle of the Duke of Weissenfels and various manufactures.

WEISSNICHTWO (Know-not-where), in Carlyle’s “Sartor,” an imaginary European city, viewed as the focus, and as exhibiting the operation, of all the influences for good and evil of the time we live in, described in terms which characterised city life in the first quarter of the 19th century; so universal appeared the spiritual forces at work in society at that time that it was impossible to say where they were and where they were not, and hence the name of the city, Know-not-where.

WEIZSAeCHER, KARL, eminent German theologian; studied at Tuebingen and Berlin; succeeded BAUR (q. v.) as professor at Tuebingen; was a New Testament critic, and the editor of a theological journal, and distinguished for his learning and lucid style; b. 1822.

WELLDON, JAMES EDWARD COWELL, bishop of Calcutta; educated at Eton and Cambridge; has held several appointments, both scholastic and clerical; has translated several of the works of Aristotle, and was Hulsean Lecturer at Cambridge in 1897; b. 1854.

WELLER, SAM, Mr. Pickwick’s servant, and an impersonation of the ready wit and best quality of London low life.

WELLESLEY, a small province, part of Penang Territory, in the Straits Settlements; of great fertility, and yields tropical products in immense quantities, such as spices, tea, coffee, sugar, cotton, and tobacco.